Somewhere In Hypertime
This essay was originally posted to Twitter between April 10, 2021 and April 14, 2021. It was composed of 1,404 words across 29 tweets.
One of the advantages SUPERMAN has in telling a clear, concise story is that it's set in its own continuity. It isn't a continuation of previous versions of Superman, like the comic books or the George Reeves TV show. It starts us fresh, from square one.
But does it?
Imagine a ball, about the size of a softball, free-floating, the only object in an otherwise featureless void. This ball is completely clear, and it's at least solid enough to hold its shape.
Don't worry about what it's made out of. For now, we'll call it Stuff.
Imagine pushing a sharpened pencil into the surface of this ball--not necessarily through the exact center, but through the bulk of it--just far enough that the point comes through the other side. Grab another pencil, pick a different spot and a different angle, and do it again.
In your imagination, keep pushing pencils through the ball until it becomes difficult to do so without the pencils making contact with each other inside. Some contact is inevitable, but do your best, until the ball is a complex network of pencils crisscrossing at various angles.
Each pencil represents a different version of the Superman story--each similar enough, but each with its own unique characteristics. Each story progresses from one end to the other. No two pencils are exactly alike, but most are similar enough that they're broadly identical.
Look inside the ball. There are places where two pencils come into contact with each other, maybe even places where three or more pencils touch each other. In this belabored metaphor, these are areas where the different versions of the story match up perfectly to each other.
Imagine one pencil is SUPERMAN (Donner, 1978) and another is Superman Returns (Singer, 2006). The line about flying being the safest way to travel occurs in both movies--they overlap here, two versions of the story that, at one point, touch each other and share a bit of material.
Imagine a nexus where many pencils are touching. This might be a moment when Clark Kent rips his shirt open, revealing the famous "S" shield, a moment that has occurred in countless versions of the Superman story since the earliest comic books by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster.
Our ball of Stuff, with all its crisscrossing pencils, contains every Superman story ever told, including all the points where they overlap. In a greater sense, the ball itself is the story of Superman. Each pencil is a different way that the story has been told over the
years.
Areas where the pencils touch are moments when the stories are perfectly consistent with one another. Areas where the pencils diverge may be consistent, or they may not be. They are not necessarily contradictory to other versions of the story, but they permit contradiction.
What I'm describing is similar, but not identical, to Hypertime, a model of continuity adopted (and soon abandoned) by DC Comics in 1998. Grant Morrison and Mark Waid devised Hypertime in an effort to resolve the various alternate timelines across the DC superhero multiverse.
In one version of the story, Ma and Pa Kent both pass away. In another version, Pa Kent passes away and Ma Kent lives on. In yet another, Ma and Pa Kent both live, and Clark visits them periodically for sage advice. These contradictions live where the pencils go off on their own.
One version of the story might say Clark Kent's favorite band is the Beatles. Another version of the story might say his high school mascot is the Smallville Crows. These unique details don't contradict each other--but, again, they live where the pencils go off on their own.
(If you really want to go wild with the metaphor, this very well may describe our own reality: a crisscrossing array of different versions of events. In one of them, or maybe several of them, you're reading this post, instead of doing the dishes or paying attention to your dog.)
Another way to think of a nexus of many pencils is, these are the parts with the really important stuff--the parts that make them essentially Superman stories. You can mess with the other stuff, but nexus moments are inviolable, like a fixed point in time on Doctor Who.
No version of Superman takes precedence over any other, because all versions are happening simultaneously. They all make up the totality of Superman storytelling, as symbolized by our ball of Stuff with all the pencils stuck through it. They're all interconnected. They all count.
The reason I bring this up is because SUPERMAN, the movie, is fairly lean on background information and granular day to day details about its world and the lives of its characters. Krypton and Smallville sequences aside, it's a very streamlined movie. What we see is what we
get.
What if you want to know Clark Kent's high school mascot? His favorite band? His middle name? His favorite food? What's inside his apartment? What if you want to know what Lois Lane's parents are like? How did Luthor, Otis, and Miss Tesmacher meet? The movie provides no answers.
"Headcanon" is the notion that you, the audience, can supply additional information that is not contained within the story itself. Maybe the story is an extended dream sequence. Maybe it takes place in the same universe as another story. Maybe two characters are secretly in love.
To an extent, we supply a little bit of our own material to every story. We don't simply accept stories as-is. We make meaning with them, and that meaning differs depending on who we are, how we're feeling, what our life has been like. The final draft happens in our minds.
Headcanon takes this idea much further. Our experience of the story goes beyond the act of mere interpretation. We become active participants in the development of the story. Nobody has to agree on anyone else's headcanon--only on the evidence contained in the story itself.
And that's the catch. Headcanon must be consistent with the details of the story, which we all have access to and agree upon. Like scientists evaluating evidence, we can't take liberties with the source material to goose things in the direction we prefer. There must be rules.
Some people are wedded to their personal headcanons. Others hate the very idea of it. I prefer to think of it as a thought experiment, which might enhance our enjoyment of stories, so long as we don't take it seriously. It's a way of spending more time in the world of the story.
If all Superman stories are part of the totality of Superman storytelling, and if many of those stories either overlap or don't contradict each other, then maybe we can piece together a SUPERMAN movie headcanon that is consistent across various other Superman stories.
For example: I'm not sure if other versions of the story have addressed this, but if the Fab Four are a good enough favorite band for Post-Crisis Clark, they're a good enough favorite band for movie Clark, whose high school years would have been in the midst of
Beatlemania.
The Smallville Crows were his high school mascot (as opposed to, say, the Smallville Spartans), his apartment has pennants and a weight set (only as a plausible excuse for why he's such a big guy), his middle name is Jerome (or Joseph, depending on your taste), and so on.
I prefer to think he's a vegetarian, as seen in the comic book limited series Superman: Birthright. But, given that he talks about going out for a hamburger, he might be more of a boeuf bourguignon guy, as seen in many stories--starting with a sly joke in Superman #297 (1976).
There are all kinds of details we can pull from other Superman stories that aren't a part of the movie continuity, but don't contradict it, either, in order to shore up the backstory of the movie. Which questions matter, and which answers we choose, is up to us as individuals.
To answer the initial question of this essay:
Of course SUPERMAN exists in its own continuity. Of course it starts the story from square one.
But, sometimes, it's fun to explore otherwise. What if it did share a connection to the other stories, at least just a little bit?
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Published 3/9/2024
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